A Rant on Beer Influencers

well... I was going to be honest and as unmerciful as ever

Seriously though, it was pretty rare that I found faulty or bad beer (with some exceptions), and I could have cared less about scoring free beers.

I did have all sorts of characters contact me though in the past wanting to reach out to me to promote their "stuff" to which I was like uh... no... Interesting people popped out of the woodwork lets say.

In the end though if you are doing all of that on your own, to do it real well it takes a lot of time and I just didn't have it. It obviously was not my full time job or going to put a roof over my head that's for sure.

 

That's exactly what I thought. Really.

 

That's fine, but the user still has to open the site. If I do click on a site and realize it's an "influencer" not to my liking, I move on. Don't we ultimately decide what we want to watch or not. Influencers can post what they want and I have the choice to watch or ignore.

 

I think a good number of folks do social media like driving by a car accident and staring. Those prurient-like instincts die very slowly, I'm afraid.

 

You guys made me type "NA beer influencer" on Youtube, and my life will never again be the same, even if the sound was off.

Holy Jebus, sitting here in my bubble...

 

And that is scary, I've only recently started to pay attention to FB because of a high school class of '69 FB page. It really is mesmerizing watching the permutations and functioning of the associated algorithms. Those tentacles really miss nothing. It is a crazy ball of wax!

 

But surely you must love Hoppy Floppy and those great beer reviews...

 

Missed the original part of this thread, but JFC who cares? It’s all harmless, and even if the algorithm forces it on you, you can choose to hide those types of posts

 

the thing is, you have to actually pay attention & GAF for it to matter. "Instagram" in my day meant your next door neighbors grew pot in their backyard & had a low fence.

 

Sponsored or boosted content isn't substantially different than banner ads on websites [like this one] or a billboard at the side of the road. IMO, because as @shadyside said..

Agreed. I've been surfing the web since I was at least 10 years old and by now I am very well practiced at ignoring the steady onslaught of overt and covert advertising that is part and parcel of doing anything online. Social media is only the latest extension of the online experience, but the advertising is not substantially different.

OK, now you're moving goalposts from a discussion of influencers and advertising to how social media platforms track users to deploy advertising. They are very different issues. But to @shadyside's point, it all still depends on the user choosing to engage with the advertising and they can leave the social media platform entirely if advertising or other tracking gets bad enough. By that metric the billboard on the side of the road near your home or work that you can't avoid could arguably be more intrusive than a social media algorithm.

Don't get me wrong... I have plenty of negative thoughts about social media algorithms exploiting the worst of society and human psychological weaknesses to chase clicks and viral engagement over any other consideration of society's well-being... it's fuckin' bad. However, I think there is a line to be drawn between those concerns and deployment of advertising.

 

It's like those State Farm and Have a Tampa road signs everywhere across the south many years ago. They were everywhere, mile after mile. Those things pop up in my dreams. They do work on you one way or another.